Preaching to Facebook faithful: Vatican looks past the pulpit to social media
LISBON — If people don't go to the church, then the church must go to the people — and the people, the Vatican's top communications experts have found, are on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and other all-inclusive, non-denominational digital houses of worship.
"We're used to one direction for communications. We're used to a microphone or a pulpit," Bishop Paul Tighe, a Vatican culture secretary for the Roman Catholic Church told USA TODAY as he prepared to travel from Rome on Monday to Portugal's shabby-chic capital for Web Summit, Europe's largest tech conference.
In a sign of the times, the Vatican has been invited to the seven-year-old event for the first time.
Tighe said that in general the Vatican views social media as a place to reach people who might not ordinarily "tune in" to its various messages. But it also wants to avoid shoving those messages down peoples' throats. "We are not trying to sell anything or bombard people or manipulate them," he said.
"In digital media you only gain an audience if you engage with people and listen to their questions and are willing to debate with them," Tighe said.
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Much of the Catholic Church's strength is "no longer going to come from Rome but from building up capacity at a local level where we can have a more conversational, participatory form of dialogue," he said.
Tighe, who moved from the Vatican's communications office to its culture beat last year, said about 600 people work in the Vatican's communications department, but only half a dozen are devoted to social media, mostly related to managing Pope Francis' popular Twitter account: @Pontifex. That's going to change.
The church is "realigning" the department to focus more on social media, including using analytics tools that can track the reach of its accounts. The Vatican will explore all the social media platforms to see which will make a good fit, Tighe said. Currently, the church is receiving advice from Instagram, a visual-heavy platform Tighe said "works quite well" for the church.
"You have to ask yourself what they can add to what you're doing and trying to achieve," Tighe said.
It was Pope Benedict who launched the @Pontifex Twitter handle in 2013 about a month before he retired. Pope Francis, his successor, now has more than 25 million followers in nine languages and usually tweets about three times a week. Two of these posts are linked to set pieces that are part of his regular communications with the public. The content and tone of the other tweet depends on whether the pope wants to weigh in or offer guidance on a particular world event. Pope Francis doesn't physically tweet himself, but he does inspect each tweet before it is published and offers amendments and suggestions to get the emphasis right.
"A church figure turning up at Web Summit may seem a little bit strange but it's partly about wanting to learn about a culture that is quite different from our own," Tighe said. "Equally, we all live in the same world and one of the things we can talk about is how to make this world a more human place." He added: "I'll certainly change the sartorial presence."
There is little data so far that sheds light on how the church's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics feel about the church's use of social media. One study, published in May by sociology researcher Paul K. McClure of Baylor University, found that social media may be weakening the faithful's ties to religion.
"On Facebook, there is no expectation that one’s ‘likes’ be logically consistent and hidebound by tradition,” McClure said in a statement when his study, Faith and Facebook in a Pluralistic Age: The Effects of Social Networking Sites on the Religious Beliefs of Emerging Adults, was published in the journal Sociological Perspectives. "Religion, as a result, does not consist of timeless truths . . . Instead, the Facebook effect is that all spiritual options become commodities and resources that individuals can tailor to meet their needs."